Hillary Clinton’s sneaky email server practices began earlier than previously believed, according to a damning new book out Tuesday about the two-time presidential candidate.
In “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write that in 2008, after losing the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, then-New York Sen. Clinton “instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the [email] messages sent and received by top staffers.”
The purpose of the project was to expose staffers who Clinton believed were disloyal to her during the campaign, The Wall Street Journal writes in a review of “Shattered,” which relies on more than 100 sources.
The spy campaign shows that Clinton “possesses an almost Nixonian paranoia about treachery and, second, that her use of a private email server at the State Department was never the naive ‘mistake’ she pretended it was,” The Journal’s review reads.
“In fact, she didn’t want anyone reading her emails the way she was reading those of her 2008 staffers.”
As has now been widely documented, Clinton would go on to use secret email server as secretary of state. She and her top aides traded hundreds of classified emails on the system, which included a server that was housed in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
The Clinton staffers who conducted the review are not named in “Shattered,” but some clues were laid out in emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account last year.
Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s campaign IT director and the technician who managed her State Department server, was identified in one Sept. 3, 2015 email as retrieving emails from Clinton’s campaign system.
“Bryan was the one who retrieved all our emails for Maura to read,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s 2008 campaign policy director, wrote in a Sept. 3, 2015 email, which was published by WikiLeaks in October.
That date is significant because it was when Pagliano invoked his Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify to the House Select Benghazi Committee about his work on Clinton’s State Department server. (RELATED: Hillary’s Email Server Technician Secretly Retrieved Emails From Her 2008 Campaign Staff)
Pagliano was hired at the State Department in May 2009. Clinton paid him out of pocket to set up her server and to conduct maintenance on it when needed.
“Maybe that is why he’s avoiding testifying,” Tanden added in the email to Podesta, speculating about why Pagliano refused to talk to the Benghazi Committee.
Pagliano would later talk only to the FBI about his work for Clinton. He did so only after receiving limited immunity.
The Maura mentioned in Tanden’s email is most likely Maura Palley, Clinton’s deputy counsel on the 2008 campaign. She now works for the Clinton Foundation.
The rest of “Shattered” details the dysfunction that gripped the Clinton campaign. Clinton’s top campaign officials broke up into competing factions and failed to take both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seriously enough as competitors. Campaign manager Robby Mook also relied too heavily on data analytics to dictate campaign strategy.
